5 Metrics to Track Customer Satisfaction

Metrics are important in every aspect of business. Without them, you don’t know how well you’re doing or where you could make improvements. Truly, a company without metrics is just doing the day-to-day operations without any real measure of successes or opportunities.

If you’re looking for a way to gauge the overall health of your business, look to your customers for their input. From there, you can use their feedback to get the ball rolling in the right direction. Here are five metrics that can help you track customer satisfaction:

1. Customer Satisfaction

The customer satisfaction survey is one of the earliest inventors of feedback. These surveys provide a standard way to collect data and gain a big-picture insight regarding the overall happiness of your customers. Although customer satisfaction surveys can be distributed in a variety of ways, the goal is still the same: to learn how satisfied—or not—your customers are with your product or service.

These surveys are often delivered by way of:

Kiosk or face to face questionnaires

Post-service emails or auto-dialers

Email surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys often revolve around a number score, whereby you ask customers to choose a number 1 through 5 or 10. You then take the average of the scores to determine your customers’ overall satisfaction rating.

2. Customer Churn

You landed a customer, but they never came back. Why? A customer feedback survey may help you understand why you’re experiencing churn, rather than maintaining long-standing customer relationships.

Loyalty is vital to any business. If your customers are leaving after one or two interactions with you, you need to know why. Understanding the metric of churn can help you anticipate the ebbs and flows of your particular industry, while simultaneously finding ways to accommodate customers’ needs before they go elsewhere.

3. Customer Referrals

If one person loves you, ten more will, too. But, how do you know who will tell their friends and neighbours great things about you if you don’t have a feel for their satisfaction?

An NPS survey (Net Promoter Score) can help you dig deep and understand a customer’s likeliness to recommend you to someone else. Using a scale from 1 to 10, this survey aims to remove the emotion of your customers’ transactions by simply asking, “How likely am I to refer you?” Besides providing you with valuable feedback that helps you understand where your opportunities lie, NPS surveys psychologically nudge your consumers toward referring you, even if the idea hadn’t previously crossed their minds.

4. Customer Acquisition Costs

Everybody knows you have to spend money to make money, but if you’re spending more on your customers than they are on your business, your bottom line is a little lopsided. To figure out your customer acquisition cost (CAC), divide all of your marketing expenses by the number of customers gained during a set time period. The result will help you understand how much you’re spending on each customer, which marketing strategies are working in your favor, and which efforts are costing you too much cash.

How do you find out what brought people your way in the first place? Consider conducting an on-site survey from time to time so you can check in with your customers in real-time. This will also help you gain other valuable feedback that could help your business grow.

5. Customer Effort Score

The more difficult you make consumers’ interactions, the less likely they are to turn into loyal customer. The Customer Effort Score (CES) allows your consumers to measure the amount of effort they had to put towards an interaction with your business.

This survey is focused on a single phrase: “My issue was handled with ease.”

If the customer agrees, great job! If your accumulated scores are low, your customers are exerting too much effort to do business with your company.

You know customer satisfaction is important, but how do you measure it? If you’re looking for a little help getting started, don’t stress! Our team of skilled customer satisfaction survey experts is here to help you devise the perfect in-person survey, concoct the right questionnaire, or tailor your feedback forms in a way that will work best for your business. Reach out to us today to get started!